Thursday, April 21, 2022

Almost Everyone Is Privileged: The Tragedy And Nuance Of Privilege

Almost everyone is going to, at least in some situations, be treated better or worse by an irrationalistic culture based on aspects of themselves that have nothing to do with the judgment made, or aspects of themselves they cannot simply change.  Many people like to pretend they are rational, consistent, and prone to treat people in a way that is not motivated by assumptions.  Most of them only lie to themselves and others.  Though the word "privilege" is most regularly encountered in reference to men and white people, almost every group--men, women, the old, the young, those of different skin colors or cultural/national backgrounds, and so on--is discriminated against or treated with special reverence by various people who dare to think that they have reason on their side.  In reality, there are many different forms and extents of privilege that can be noticed in how Western culture treats different groups.

There is male privilege: men are often assumed to be better leaders, more rational, or physically stronger than women.  There is female privilege: women are often assumed to have some special moral innocence that men lack, to be incapable of doing anything truly heinous when it comes to physical or sexual abuse, and to deserve more protection and care than men.  Ironically, men and women are also both mischaracterized as being shallow by default according to conflicting stereotypes, but each one tends to be given privilege in Western society and others.  Then there is white privilege, to give another common example: whites are often assumed to be more intelligent than blacks or to not be threatening by default as blacks sometimes are.  There is also black privilege: blacks are often treated as if no one can criticize them even for genuine faults just because of past injustices against them, and they are not condemned as consistently if they are guilty of racism against other races.  I could continue.

Some pretend like only men are treated in a way that is always more positive than how women are treated and that the inverse is not just as generally common; some pretend like only white people are somehow the victims in a culture more broadly shirking away from racism.  Others might think women, blacks, the young, the old, or some other group is the grand collective victim of society at large and that other groups deserve double standards or are not treated unfairly at all.  In truth, people are routinely discriminated against for a variety of things, from their attractiveness to their family background to their economic status to their level of education to their gender or race.  Almost everyone is discriminated against by someone or benefits from idiotic biases of others, but few would ever realize this due to personal stupidity and a fixation on the very limited forms of discrimination that are now popular issues.

Nothing except a person's rationality and moral character could possibly make them worthy of special respect, love, and affirmation, yet genuine concern for these things is rather selective and rare.  No matter the basis for discrimination, looking down on or up to anyone for reasons that go beyond their worldview and moral consistency is an asinine and futile thing that does not change core reality.  It is irrational and unfair to assume that someone is more intelligent because of their beauty or less competent because they are not conventionally attractive, that someone is weak because they are a woman or deserving of harshness because they are a man, or that someone faces constant hatred on all sides because they are black or that they are uninterested in defeating racism if they are white--or any other such things.

Only one group is superior, at a minimum in the sense of having philosophical clarity and aligning with reality, to those outside of it (with the exceptions of very young children and those with mental impairments that prevent them from realizing things beyond logical axioms and their own existence): rationalists.  Distinctions of the body like gender and race do not divide anyone from reason and relationships built around it.  Other distinctions of circumstance like economic class, baseline physical attractiveness, or family descent dictate nothing about a person's understanding of reason and self-awareness.  Anti-rationalists, though, are lesser beings than rationalists.  All the nuanced, arbitrary types of societal privilege in the world do not make someone valuable for other reasons, but if truth has significance, then rationalists have more value than all others.

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